made to measure

Full Disclosure: Saw Hirsch’s show at last year’s Fringe, which I really enjoyed. She also performed at this month’s Poets Against Humanity, which is a show I helped to write (and is way funnier/less awful than the card game). Fogan is a new poet to me.

Review:Made to Measure begins with Hirsch jogging in place, headphones in and beaming aggressively. ‘Do you write every day?’ ‘Are you discovering coffee shops?’ ‘When was the last time you swam?’, like a jobseeker’s interview funnelled through aspirational Guardian supplements. The show is partly coming-of-age story (trying to wear clothes that don’t fit, literally or figuratively), partly a missive against a culture increasingly hostile to people under 30; maybe it’s more about how difficult it is to come anything resembling ‘of age’ while retaining the kind of beliefs and principles that made you want to write poetry shows.

I saw the show with Andrew Blair (ex-Godfather of the Edinburgh Poetry Scene), who described it as ‘Spaced but with poets’, which I would absolutely watch the heck out of, and is decently accurate. Hirsch and Fagan are both excellent at their chosen profession, even if ‘profession’ doesn’t mean ‘living’, and if watching two capable and curious minds hammer against a system that undervalues them and their skills feels less tragic it’s only because it’s so familiar.

Narratively, Made to Measure follows Fagan growing up in rural New Zealand and moving to London, where he and Hirsch rent a flat. The question of ‘what do you want to be when you grow up’ haunts the show, and underlying the snappy comedy and near-flawless chemistry between the performers is the uneasy feeling that the stakes are extremely real. Like Paula Varjack’s Show me the Money, the disappearing possibilities of secure and fulfilling work, stable housing and material comfort are weighed against the increasing difficulty of continuing to make art. The distance between ‘what you want to be’ and ‘growing up’ are at times painfully distant.

All that said, it’s also a remarkably uplifting piece of theatre; the fact that childhood dreams are given equal space to the realities of bill-paying and keeping up with your peers is weirdly heartening. A recurring motif is Hirsch’s little brother’s dream (played by Fagan with wide-eyed brio) of being a train-driver, which he sort of got to do when he was three – it becomes a kind of emotional anchor, a way of re-centring yourself in a culture that wants to stamp out any dream not in its own image.

The performance I saw on Friday 12 was extremely smooth and beautifully realised. Made to Measure’s conclusion, involving a (very neatly done) turn to camera, did feel a little abrupt, perhaps puncturing a bit of the show’s momentum. At the same time, the fact that it allowed a very direct address of its central concerns gives some indication of how urgent those concerns are, and was maybe worth the slight veer in tone.

Tl;dr: Made to Measure is the best two-hander poetry show I’ve ever seen, an excellent chunk of theatre that feels timely, curious and generous. Go see.

Made to Measureis on at 3.05pm every day from today (17) – 27 August, Silk Upper, 28A Kings Stables Road.